In the following essay, Maarten Van Delden discusses Carlos Fuentes' treatment of the nature of self in his novel La region mas transparente. Van Delden examines how Fuentes presents the self in two perspectives: on one hand being unaffected or formed by culture and on the other being directly tied to past, culture, and geography and how he seeks to resolve this seeming conflict.

La Región Más Transparente (1958). Carlos Fuentes's first novel, oscillates between two different perspectives on the nature of the self and its relations to history and the community. On the one hand, the novel outlines a view of the self that derives primarily from existentialist ideas found in the works of André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. In this view, the self is discontinuous, contingent, wholly unaffected by any kind of socio-cultural conditioning, permanently separated from a stable...